Steve writes editorials for each issue of Forbes under the heading of “Fact and Comment.” A widely respected economic prognosticator, he is the only writer to have won the highly prestigious Crystal Owl Award four times. The prize was formerly given by U.S. Steel Corporation to the financial journalist whose economic forecasts for the coming year proved most accurate.

In both 1996 and 2000, Steve campaigned vigorously for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. Key to his platform were a flat tax, medical savings accounts, a new Social Security system for working Americans, parental choice of schools for their children, term limits and a strong national defense. Steve continues to energetically promote this agenda.

President Obama: I'm the Law

English: President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff, react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One question congressional and presidential candidates should be asked is how we should go about restoring the rule of law to our federal government. Not even during the world wars of the last century was the executive branch as brazen in assuming sweeping and unlegislated powers, changing laws without the consent of the legislative branch and ignoring laws it didn’t like.

Lawsuits are certainly one possible avenue to take, but a slow one–which is what the White House is counting on. It will do what it wants, and by the time an unfavorable decision is handed down, it will have done many other things. It will also find ways to circumvent such a decision or just ignore it altogether.

How will the Administration act when, as is likely, the Supreme Court delivers an adverse ruling concerning the President’s appointment of members to the National Labor Relations Board when the Senate wasn’t technically in recess? Obama’s appointees went on to make rulings that were harmful to business. Of course, the

Administration will promise to comply and will then pull who knows what cards it has up its sleeve to make an end-run around the decision.

The IRS got caught singling out conservative groups for harassment–and nothing was done. The President, with a straight face, told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that there wasn’t a “smidgen” of evidence of any corruption, and the Justice Department has made clear it’s deep-sixing any serious probe. But even worse is the fact that the IRS is readying regulation that will make it legal to deny tax exemptions to predominantly conservative groups, while it turns a blind eye to organizations more friendly to the Administration’s Big Government agenda.

To add insult to injury, the new IRS commissioner has decreed that the agency will pay $62 million in bonuses, declaring, “I firmly believe that this investment in our employees will directly benefit taxpayers and the tax system.”

The unending changes the White House has unilaterally made to ObamaCare have been well documented, the latest being the extension until 2016 of the employer mandate for midsize companies.

The ways in which the EPA has waged its jihad against the eastern coal industry has also been well documented–and science be damned. Forbes.com columnist Larry Bell cites a flagrant example of the EPA’s ignoring inconvenient science: “A group within EPA’s own Science Advisory Board (SAB) determined that the studies upon which that regulation [setting CO 2 -emission limits for new power plants] was based had never been responsibly peer reviewed and that there was no evidence that those limits can be accomplished using available technology.”

The EPA is also set to ban production and sale of 80% of current wood-burning stoves. Who knows what aroused its ire against these innocuous devices? But this will impose a real hardship on people who live in remote areas, such as much of Alaska. The EPA has arbitrarily decided that stoves cannot emit more than 12 micrograms of fine particulate emissions per cubic meter of air. To put that silly limit in perspective, Bell notes that “secondhand tobacco smoke in a closed car can expose a person to 3,000–4,000 micrograms” per cubic meter.

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